The Eyes Of Kid Midas

by Нил Шустерман

  "I tried," said Kevin. "The glasses made me sick—they can't unmake me sick."

  Josh slowed down and began to catch his breath from his whirlwind romance with greed. The house felt chilly. No—not just chilly, it felt cold, and Kevin—well, Kevin looked cold. He had wrapped himself in a blanket and was shivering slightly.

  Kevin was ready to call it a day, and Josh would have agreed—until Josh turned his eyes just a few feet up and saw the poster hanging so innocently above Kevin's bed.

  "One more thing," said Josh.

  "I'm fried," said Kevin.

  Josh smiled. "Too fried for the car of your dreams?"

  Kevin sat up slowly. He thought about it, then hesitated. "Give me the glasses, and I'll do it," said Josh.

  "No!" Kevin grabbed the glasses from his nightstand and put them on.

  It was called the Lamborghini Countach, and it was the subject of most of Kevin's classroom doodles. Kevin, fighting exhaustion, raced down the stairs with Josh and into the garage.

  "I never even thought I'd ever see a Lam-ber-geenie, and now I'm going to have one," said Kevin.

  Josh shook his head. "How many times do I have to tell you? It's not Lam-ber-geenie, it's Lamborghini! You have to think Italian!"

  The garage was empty except for the ancient junk against the wall and two oil spots where his parents' cars had been. Kevin had turned the stereo off on the way through the living room, so the only sound came from the heater in the corner of the garage. It hummed, showing traces of flames as it tried unsuccessfully to warm the unseasonably cold house.

  "We'll get two of them," said Josh. "Okay?"

  "One for you and one for me, right?"

  "Right."

  "Okay."

  Kevin took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and said the words, which echoed in the empty garage.

  "Two red Lam-ber-geenies."

  "Lamborghinis!"

  "Yeah, yeah."

  The colors before Kevin's eyes began to swirl, and he felt as though his whole brain was filtering out through the dark glass.

  From where Josh stood, the sight of the glasses at work was just as remarkable, and although he had seen it before, each time was better than the last. Josh watched as the glasses got so dark that they looked like portals into another universe. Deep within that universe, Josh saw Kevin's eye burning like blue flames. From this side of the glasses, Kevin's mind seemed like something impossibly huge, and almost as a reflex, Josh grabbed tightly onto a bicycle hook in the wall for fear of being sucked right in through the glasses. Blinding colors pulsed out from the glasses, and Josh had to shield his eyes.

  When he looked again, there were two Lamborghinis just sitting in the garage as if they had no better place to be.

  Josh let go of the hook, leapt into the window of the nearest one, and sank into the seat. Keys were in the ignition, and he wished with all his heart that he knew how to drive.

  Kevin wasn't as quick to get into his car. As his trembling hand removed the red-hot glasses, he could feel his heart pulsing in the tiny veins in his eyeballs and knew his eyes must have been bloodshot beyond belief. His head swam and ached as if someone had reached inside and pulled the two cars right out of his skull. He felt very, very cold.

  Kevin got into his car and sat down, feeling the smooth leather against his aching body. He looked toward Josh, and they both noticed something at the same time. It was so cold in the garage that their breath came out in puffs of steam.

  Kevin looked around, to find everything in the garage frozen. An icicle dripped from the leaky spigot, and the puddle beneath it was a sheet of ice. Even the heater had been snuffed out. It must have been twenty degrees in that garage!

  It's a side effect, thought Kevin. The glasses needed lots of energy to work, and they stole energy wherever they could find it. Heat, light, fire. The glasses just sucked the heat right out of the air!

  Kevin and Josh sat in the freezing garage, playing behind the wheels of their twin Lamborghinis for a while, until Josh finally turned to Kevin.

  "So now what?"

  Amazingly enough, Kevin couldn't answer him. Now they had everything. They had wished up everything their hearts desired, from the smallest toy to the largest. The house was piled to the ceiling with things.

  Having played the video games, listened to the stereos, watched the home theaters, tried the candy machines, tasted all the food, worn all the clothes, sat on all the couches, and played in both the cars—after all that—they were finally bored. So now what? . . . So now what?

  Kevin racked his aching brain for something else that he wanted but couldn't find it. The world of goods and services had nothing more to offer.

  And then a thought occurred to Kevin that put everything into a slightly different perspective . . .

  "What am I going to tell my parents?"

  Josh looked up from his dashboard. "Yeah," he said, "what are you going to tell your parents about all this stuff?"

  Kevin looked down at his new gold Rolex watch. It was five fifteen, and his mom, who was never on time going to work but always on time getting back, picked up Teri from field hockey practice promptly at five. They were due home any second.

  Back in the house, Muffy cowered behind a jukebox. The place was a disaster area, as if someone had crammed a mansion into a three-bedroom home. The obvious excuses passed quickly through Kevin's mind as he felt panic take hold.

  It was like this when I got here. Did he really think they would buy that, knowing full well that he stayed home from school today?

  We won it on a game show. What game show? How? Where? What a lame story.

  Remember when the sweepstakes letter said "You May Already Be a Winner"? No, no, no! What was he going to do? Practically paralyzed by panic, Kevin sat at the foot of the stairs and watched as Josh paced a short path in the overstuffed room.

  "We can't let them know! You've got to make it go away!" said Josh. "Wish it all back!"

  "I can't," croaked Kevin. "You know the glasses can't undo what they've done." Kevin heard the troubled engine of his mother's Volvo backfire down the street. It was the only warning they got—and Kevin figured they had ten seconds, tops.

  "Quick," said Josh, "do something! Your parents will just have heart attacks when they see this stuff, but mine will have heart attacks and give me a double-lifetime grounding without possibility of parole, no matter what the explanation is! DO SOMETHING."

  "What?"

  "If you can't just lose the stuff, then send it somewhere else!"

  "Where?"

  "ANYWHERE!"

  The electric garage door opener cranked into action. Kevin could hear the car pulling up the driveway.

  Kevin stood up, and without a second to lose, held his head together to keep it from splitting and made a desperate wish.

  "Uhh.... Uh..."

  "Hurry!"

  "Uh . . . everything that I made today, go . . . Go next door!"

  First came the blackness, then the colors, then the fingers reaching into his brain, and a flash of light. Kevin screamed, threw the glasses from his face, and they fell down upon

  . . . an empty floor.

  The house was exactly the way it was before they had begun their shopping spree. The same old TV. The same old furniture. Everything else was gone.

  Mrs. Midas's car backfired once as it pulled into the empty garage.

  There was a rumble then—a shaking of the ground and a creaking of wood, like an earthquake. Kevin and Josh raced out the front door in time to see it happen.

  The house next door was a small home owned by the Kimballs, a pleasant elderly couple who never bothered anyone. The Kimball place was half the size of the Midas home and would not have the space for all the things Kevin had so hurriedly wished upon it.

  Mrs. Kimball, sitting quietly on the front porch, could only watch as the walls began to buckle outward. Upstairs a frozenyogurt machine expanded through a window and crashed to the ground with the shattering of glas
s.

  A grand piano bounced through the side of the house, landing in a flower bed, and the front door regurgitated stereo equipment, with a rasping of metal and plastic.

  The front lawn began to ripple like an ocean as video games sprouted up from the earth, and from the garage came an awful crunching sound that could only be the two Lamborghinis flattening the old couple's Buick against the wall.

  It ended with a blast of the chimney as hundreds of rare coins shot into the air, showering the neighborhood in shimmering gold and silver.

  People came racing from their homes—but because it all happened so quickly, they could only see the results, not the cause.

  "Cool!'' said Teri, who had come out of the garage in time to witness the end of the spectacle. Kevin's mom could only stand and stare like the rest of the neighbors, who scratched their heads and looked to the skies as if some cargo jet had unexpectedly dumped its load.

  Mrs. Kimball gazed around her with her hands on her hips, then slowly made her way down from the porch and calmly climbed around the various artifacts that littered her lawn.

  She smiled at Kevin's mom and politely asked, "Excuse me, may I use your phone?"

  Kevin's mom nodded, and the old woman quietly disappeared into their house.

  Kevin watched from his bedroom window that night as lookey-loos from all over town gathered to watch a troop of movers organize everything on the Kimball's front lawn.

  An insurance adjuster, one step short of falling into a coma, just stood there on the lawn and gaped for an hour.

  There was applause when Mr. Kimball drove a Lamborghini out of the garage, and then Frankie Philpot showed up, as everyone knew he would. Frankie, a dentist with a burning interest in the supernatural, had his own local—if somewhat cheap—cable TV show, devoted entirely to psychic phenomena. Frankie and his dental hygienist video crew interviewed the Kimballs right beneath Kevin's window.

  Frankie Philpot deduced that the Kimball house existed over a space-time wormhole thingy that somehow opened up into the Bermuda Triangle or a distant department store.

  The insurance adjuster, for lack of any better explanation, decided that the Kimballs were victims of a hit-and-run delivery truck.

  Everyone else just figured it was "one of those things" and eventually went home.

  7

  KEVIN BECOMING

  While certain other parts of the world may have been engulfed in storm clouds, the suburban town of Ridgeline awoke to a bright, sunny day.

  The sun rose behind the electrical tower on the hill in back of Kevin Midas's home, casting shadows of the girders on Kevin's white walls. The room had stayed cold all night, defying the thermostat's attempts to keep it the same temperature as the rest of the house. Only now, as the morning light began to shine through the eastern window, did warmth return to Kevin's life.

  All night he had stayed bundled under the many blankets that his mother always insisted he keep folded up on the end of his bed. When he awoke at dawn, he couldn't move a muscle without feeling incredible pangs shoot through his head and then ricochet down through the rest of his body.

  He had gone straight to bed the night before, without eating, so he felt weak, and he could do little more than lie there and watch the slow progress of the girder shadows as they moved across the wall.

  There was a buzzing around him—a hum that could barely be heard. At first he took it for his father's electric razor, and then for the buzz of the high-tension wires outside—until he realized that the sound was coming from his desk.

  The glasses were there, resting six inches from the wall—six inches from an electrical outlet. Kevin watched in amazement as a line of blue electricity arced across the air from the outlet to the glasses.

  They're recharging, Kevin realized. They had taken the heat from his room, but it wasn't enough. Now they were sucking the very electricity from the walls! How much energy did they need? Kevin wondered. How much could they absorb? Kevin reached out and took a pencil from his desk. With it he gently moved the glasses away from the wall until the electrical arc was broken. The glasses just sat there now, glistening in the morning sun.

  Kevin then crawled out from underneath his covers like a slug from underneath a rock. While everyone else in the house still slept, he suffered through a shower that didn't make him feel the least bit better.

  When he returned to his room, the glasses were waiting.

  He put them on even before he dressed and instantly felt the change. It began with his eyes—a soothing feeling that slowly spread down and out, reaching the tips of his fingers and the soles of his feet. He closed his eyes and let the feeling wash through him. He was better now, and he couldn't imagine why he had waited this long to put the glasses back on.

  He dressed in plain old jeans and a shirt, then stared at himself in the tall mirror against his closet door. Plain, ordinary, boring—that's how he looked. That's how he always looked. There's no reason to dress like this, Kevin thought. No reason at all. He could look like . . . he could be whoever or whatever he wanted.

  The secret, Kevin figured, was not to ask for everything you ever wanted all at once, but just to ask for the right things at the right times.

  He imagined what he wanted himself to be wearing—he could almost see it in the mirror—and then he said the words that dressed him head to toe. Kevin stared at himself in the mirror from all angles, admiring his flashy designer outfit, complete with brand-new basketball shoes, until he caught sight of Teri standing in the doorway behind him.

  "What's with you?" she asked, morning gravel still in her throat.

  "Nothing," said Kevin, casually flipping up the collar on his new leather jacket. "I'm checking out some new clothes—is there anything wrong with that?"

  "You're such a basket case," she replied, both of them knowing full well that the true basket case was Teri, as she shuffled off with drooping eyelids toward the bathroom.

  That morning Kevin joined his father on his morning jog—something Kevin had tried only once before. On that one occasion, Patrick Midas had driven Kevin to absolute exhaustion and then acted surprised when Kevin couldn't keep up.

  His father, who liked to speak in short, meaningless phrases, always told Kevin, "No pain, no gain," and used that motto as an excuse to turn any father-and-son physical activity into a trial by fire for Kevin. Kevin was amazed that after all that, he still enjoyed sports as much as he did—although his best sport was soccer, the only sport his father absolutely detested.

  With the glasses firmly affixed to his face and a well-placed wish on his lips, Kevin joined his father on the morning run and left the poor man in his dust. When Patrick Midas finally made it back to the front door, dripping with sweat and barely able to breathe, Kevin, already there, jogged in place, barely winded at all, and said, "No pain, no gain," with a shrug.

  Before going inside, Kevin sat on the porch and watched the Kimballs for a while. Their house would never be the same, but perhaps that didn't matter, because the old couple was excitedly preparing for what would be the mother of all garage sales.

  ***

  Things were different for Kevin in school. It began that very day and gradually took hold throughout the week. Perhaps it was the way he was dressed—or perhaps it was the way no one could see his eyes behind those intensely cool glasses that seemed to change color at will. Or maybe it was just self-confidence; a presence about him that made kids get out of his way when he walked down the hall, even though he was a head shorter than most.

  Or maybe it was the way that he always seemed to have just what people needed when they needed it.

  Kevin had never before had the guts to join in a conversation with kids who weren't his best buddies—but now that had changed.

  Justin Gere, an eighth grader, was complaining to a couple of his friends that he had every major-league baseball card issued that year except Carlysle Sparks, one of the Dodgers' rarely used relief pitchers. Rumor was the card had never been printed.


  "Well, wouldn't you know it!" said Kevin Midas. "I've got an extra one." He presented Carlysle Sparks to Justin as if he had pulled it out of his sleeve, which he had.

  Alyssa Peevar was in tears because she had lost her charm bracelet down a deep storm drain that appeared to go all the way to China. The bracelet was, of course, lost forever, but Kevin reached down into the drain and produced it—or at least a good replica.

  When Dash Kaminsky, who the girls claimed was drop-dead gorgeous, got his million-dollar lips smashed by a hockey puck, who was there with a handful of ice and a kind word that seemed to make the swelling go away in seconds? Kevin, of course.

  In just a few days Kevin's popularity had grown like a vine on the brickwork of Ridgeline Middle School—quickly and silently, so that very few people remembered it being any different. Kevin had made the transition to everybody's buddy, and although he wasn't the most popular kid in school, people who would never have given him the time of day before suddenly said hello and didn't mind having him around.

  It was clear to Kevin that things were changing—he was changing. But changing wasn't the right word. He was becoming. Becoming what? he wondered. He decided it didn't really matter, because whatever it was, it was better than what he had been before.

  A few other people noticed Kevin's frightening transformation.

  Josh was one. When Josh saw Kevin waltz in that Tuesday morning after their ill-fated shopping spree, he knew right away that Kevin wasn't going to give the glasses a rest. Josh, who had admittedly been a little greed-meister the day before, had learned his lesson when it was crammed down his throat. The glasses were bad news. Period. But Kevin didn't get it.

  "The storm's still growing," Josh would often remind Kevin.

  "So, isn't there a drought?" Kevin would answer, letting the storm roll off the top of his head like water off Scotchguard. The truth was that the storm made the news every day. "An inland hurricane" was what they were now calling it. They named it Hurricane Gladys, but it should have been called Kevin.

  Bertram also noticed Kevin's new station in life. Bertram would chew his pink cud and watch in disgust as Kevin actually chummed around with older, respectable kids.